More Copyright…
Not Really for Fun…
Writers who don’t have the time to learn copyright seem to not like to have it thrust upon them. So most will just skip this and last night’s post. Just nature of the desire of the uninformed to remain uninformed. I think it is a rule of nature.
I answered a comment I wanted to bring up here because I got similar in emails.
Since 1987 or so (Actually March 1st 1989) in the US, copyright notice on a work is not needed or required.
Reasons to put a copyright date on a work…
- — It can be a “notice” to the uninformed that someone owns the work.
- — It helps readers remember if they have read the book or not and when. (Nora Roberts a prime example.)
- — Helps stop what are called “Innocent Infringers” which I call stupid people.
Reasons to NOT put a copyright date on a work…
- — Since books no longer spoil as they did in traditional publishing, it makes the reader date the book and not buy it.
- — All books look and feel new without copyright dates.
Reasons to put a NEW copyright date on a work being redone…
- — Makes the books look new and fresh in reader’s minds.
- — Gives notice to the uninformed that someone owns the work.
This third way really gets the best of both worlds, however, if you don’t refresh your books every five to eight years, the new date starts looking old to readers.
Either way, you never say in the book the copyright is registered.
Use of Song Lyrics in Fiction?
Never. Unless you wrote the song. There is no level of “fair use exception” that allows the use of a song lyric or title that is a lyric in the song.
And before you go claiming you can use exemptions in the theft of other people’s work, learn the exceptions. Sigh…
You never sell a story or a novel. You license it.
There is no reason to ever actually sell a part or all of a copyright. And it takes a signature to do so because it is property.
Because copyright is property, if you are making money from your copyright, you can never go bankrupt (because it is not protected property in a bankruptcy). And it can be transferred in a divorce. Again, it is property. Valuable property.
So a few basics that I have gotten asked about over the last month or so.
10 Comments
Emilia
The Bite-Sized Copyright classes have been good. I have the Copyright Handbook from Nolo Press and I’ve read some of it, with the intention to read the rest, and then read it again. However the Bite-Sizd classes are an easier introduction to the important subject.
dwsmith
Thanks, Emilia. A lot of material in those 52 weeks of videos, that’s for sure.
Mary
What about song lyrics clearly in the public domain?
For instance, folksongs like Frère Jacques (1780-1860) or Yankee Doodle Dandy (American Revolution) or all the works of Tom Lehrer, which he proactively put into the public domain a few years before he recently died at 97. With no family, I’m sure it was his way to insure his songs lived on.
Is the prohibition against song lyrics so strong you would never use even them as a cultural touchstone?
dwsmith
Mary, no assumption of a copyright police force. There is none. Owners of copyright are the ones who will enforce.
So, if you used the original source and not something published newer and copyright protected, you are fine with public domain. But I would suggest that if you do use a public domain lyric, you put in a file exactly where you found it so when you get contacted by someone who used that lyric in a song, you can send them your source.
Tom Lehrer just screwed a lot of people with his good intentions. I would be very, very afraid to use any Tom Lehrer song lyrics because there has to be about a thousand claims on those songs from different sources. He can not void contracts or other people’s copyrights with his stupidity.
Nissa Harlow
One thing I’ve been wondering about:
Say a magazine or anthology publishes one of my short stories this year. Maybe, in five years, I’ll want to include that story in my own collection. The date on the collection itself would be 2030… but what about the individual stories? Would the copyright date of that 2025-published story still be 2025? Or would it now be 2030?
dwsmith
Nissa, as I said, no date is required since 1989. So you can put no dates on any of it, or any date you want. Nothing matters with dates now and copyright.
C.E. Petit
I’m going to gently disagree with Dean on one thing: Song lyrics.
Dean may well be right that it’s not worth the hassle. Keep in mind that the Nashville-centered part of the music portion of the entertainment industry is very impressed with its own rectitude and righteousness, and has a miserable track record in actually winning fully-litigated claims of “infringement by taking a portion” outside of its own federal circuit (the Sixth). The large law firms, however, are backed by behemoth entities that dwarf NYC-based commercial publishers, and can successfully make an author’s life miserable even when they’re flat wrong.
That said, there are critical factors in whether quotation of a song lyric qualifies as fair use, ranging from the amount (the entirety of “Money for Nothing”? the chorus, or one verse? the catch-phraseish “Money ain’t for nothin’ and your chicks for free”?) to the parody exception (think Weird Al Yankovic) to whether the quotation includes either a proper name or the title of the song. Not to mention where things are been asserted and/or heard — what pass for the “rules” are different in Las Vegas than in Memphis than in Orlando.
Dean’s advice to “just say no” to quoting song lyrics avoids the hassle, but it’s an overstatement to say that it represents “the law” as a copyright law professor would analyze it. (And even they won’t agree at the edges, because it’s a very circumstances-of-the-alleged-infringement-specific inquiry upon which reasonable minds — and unreasonable minds, like the Harry Fox Agency — can and do differ.) By no means am I suggesting that authors should therefore feel free to routinely embed an epigraph in each chapter of a couplet from contemporary popular music, or quote four lines of a chorus in the middle of a bar scene as being played by the band/on a jukebox (if anybody still knows what a jukebox is), because that might not be a very good business decision. It’s not, however, a “can never legally do without explicit permission” prohibition.
dwsmith
Thank you, C.E. Really, really appreciated. See how complex it is along the edges. And what C.E. does not say is the cost of finding out if you are right or wrong.
Fabien Delorme
I’m thinking of one more reason to leave the copyright year unchanged: sometimes, when reading older (say the 1990s or earlier) books set in contemporary times (say a mystery or a thriller), I can get confused: why doen’t the protagonist use their cell phone or google to solve a problem? Then I read the copyright date and think “oh, okay, makes sense, the story takes place in 1992.” But if the book says “© 2025” or doesn’t say anything, then I’ll get confused: if the author wrote it in 2025 or 2024, then the protagonist should be using the internet, or I should be told why he doesn’t. It becomes an information flow issue. Much less of an issue in made-up world stories, of course.
What do you think?
dwsmith
Rare circumstance and the author’s problem of information flow. If the reader is confused in the story, it is highly unlikely they will look at the copyright page before putting the book down. They will just quit reading and not go back to it.